The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  Soon after Alek’s return, I had dropped in for coffee at Yoash’s picture-frame shop on Agrippas Street, and he said to me: “She’s a restorer, he met her in Paris. Her name’s Ute.” I already knew this, but Yoash, bending over his work table, went on, more slowly than usual and surprisingly hostile: “The way Alek tells it, she came to the newspaper office to pick up a parcel her cousin had left there for her, and a second after she entered the room he already knew that he wanted to have children with this woman. Do you believe that? Or is he just rewriting history?”

  Alek and Yoash didn’t see a lot of each other at this time. Perhaps the political atmosphere strained relations between them: the rise of the right to power that appalled Yoash and pleased Alek the foreign correspondent—“Changing the government is always a good thing”—and perhaps there was some other reason. I didn’t see a lot of Yoash, either. But that Friday morning, for no particular reason, I dropped into his shop for a cup of coffee on my way to the market. Or perhaps the reason for my visit was that I had already met Alek since his return, and I wanted to hear what Yoash knew, and to feel I was touching him again through someone who might have met him too.

  “He wanted to have children with this woman.” The sentence cut right through my stomach to the sound of the cardboard splitting in two as Yoash slowly and intently sliced through it with his box-cutter knife. I already knew about Ute, but I didn’t know this, and suddenly I understood that in my foolishness I had seen my pregnancy with Hagar and the night of her birth as a kind of covenant between us.

  BIRTH

  On the night of the tenth of June I woke up with wet panties, a strong feeling of nausea, and a pain no worse than the pain that had been coming and going intermittently during the previous days. As soon as I woke up I knew that it had begun, and I was completely unready.

  When my sister Talush was born I was not yet six, and all I remembered of the event was that my mother went away to Afula and returned five days later with the baby, and how for some time my father would take me to the children’s house to put me to bed, because my mother had gone to feed the baby. All my girlfriends today gave birth in their thirties, and from their prenatal courses, and from the stories they told and retold afterwards, I learned things I had no idea of even after I had already given birth myself. Contraction length, dog pants, dilation, epidural, Pitocin, head presentation, breech presentation, vacuum, forceps—an entire vocabulary of combat experience that could certainly have been useful. Only once, when I was already in my ninth month, I paged through some manual in Stein’s Bookshop, and the black-and-white photographs disgusted or alarmed me to such an extent that I closed it immediately. And so I came to give birth in a state of total ignorance, with only the vaguest notion of what was happening to me.

  They say that women forget the pain of giving birth, which is absolute nonsense and I don’t know why people keep repeating it. Because what does it mean to remember pain? You remember pain in exactly the same way as you remember pleasure, which is also not exactly re-experienced with the memory, and nevertheless is implanted firmly in your body.

  It was dark in the room and I was feeling too nauseated to get up and look for clean panties in the closet, so I simply took off the wet ones and went on lying half naked on the bed under the piqué blanket. Alek’s door was shut, he had returned after I had already fallen asleep, and for some stupid, stubborn reason I got it into my head that whatever happened, I was on no account to wake him up. Maybe he had come home late from Tamara. Maybe he was with Tamara now. He had never hidden behind the door with Tamara, and the couch in his room wasn’t big enough for two, but nevertheless this piece of idiocy stuck in my head, that the two of them might be there together now, and that nothing on earth would make me call him or knock on the door.

  You could argue that my stubbornness was actually an expression of anger. That instead of punishing him I punished myself, and that what I was really doing was trying to make him feel as guilty as I could: “Look how much I love you, and look what you’re doing to me.” Maybe. I don’t know. I only know that together with the thought that he was in the room with Tamara, I was afraid of the possibility that he wasn’t home at all, that his door was still closed from the day before, and that I was mistaken in thinking that it had been open when I went to bed. Apart from which I have already said that I was unprepared, and waking Alek meant admitting that this was it, it was beginning. So even though I really knew it was beginning, at the same time it seemed to me that if I didn’t wake him up, perhaps I would fall asleep again and somehow or other I would wake up in the morning as if nothing had happened.

  I don’t know how much time passed in this way until, at a certain point, I tried to reach the bathroom to vomit, and in the darkness I threw up on the passage floor. When I squatted down with my bare bottom to clean up the mess, a whine like a dog’s suddenly escaped me and took me by surprise. This whine seems to have breached the dike, because after it, and when I returned to sit on the bed, I gave myself up entirely to self-pity and tears. I wailed and rocked, rocked and wailed, even though the contractions were not yet of an order that could not be borne in silence.

  Through closed lids I saw the light go on, and even before I opened my eyes I located him standing in the doorway.

  “Noichka … has it started?” For some reason I shook my head, but Alek took no notice of my denial. “What a swine I am,” he exclaimed and punched the doorpost with his fist. And even before I recoiled from the violence of the gesture he was already at my side, tucking the blanket around me, embracing me tightly, brushing a sticky lock of hair off my face, whispering tender words to me in Russian: “Shhh … shhh … shhh … devuchka … harosheya maya … shhh, child, don’t cry.”

  Nothing will help me, because even today this memory is dear to my heart, and all I have to do is remember Alek, concentrating intently, holding me between his hands, one hand on my breast, the other between my shoulder blades, imprisoning the sobbing inside me—all I have to do is remember it and I melt. As if the importance of those moments is far greater than everything else. Very slowly, as if we had all the time in the world, he helped me to steady my breath and pull myself together, and then he gathered me to him gently and rocked me slowly. “It’s all right … vsyo harasho … it’s all right, don’t be afraid.” Nothing will help me—because even now, when I think of complete and utter consolation, it is personified for me in that cradling in his arms and his voice whispering “don’t be afraid.” Because with that touch and that movement I felt that I was being lapped by a wondrous oceanic sensation, being filled with a sweet oceanic sensation, which was utterly and completely consoling. To this day, whenever I feel the need of consolation, I try to conjure up that sensation, and mostly I only succeed in touching its edges.

  The sheet was wet with the amniotic fluid. I was sticky and stinking of vomit, I hadn’t even brushed my teeth, and nevertheless he gathered me up and held me in his arms.

  ALEK WASN’T DISGUSTED

  Alek wasn’t disgusted by me. On the contrary, he was completely absorbed in me. Not as if he were rushing to the aid of some “emergency” but as if he was intensely moved, and yet he was able to perform all the necessary operations without fear, without being paralyzed by this intensity of emotion.

  I can’t say why I love Alek. My love is not a function of any one of his attributes, not of those that I admire, and certainly not of those that are not to my liking. And nevertheless, when I think of my sexual addiction to him, I attribute it at least to a certain extent to his attitude towards the body. I say his attitude towards “the body” and not “my body,” because it is perfectly clear to me that this attitude, which is an essential part of Alek’s nature and being, is not reserved for me alone, and that he treats other women in the same way.

  In the four years that he was in Israel with Ute, and I played the part of the classic mistress, I fucked not a few other men. In order to keep my balance, I think, and to even the score. But in all t
hese experiences, and all the experiences that came later, I never met another man like him. I’m not talking about the fact that fucking someone you love is a completely different experience, and I’m not talking about his repertoire of sexual stunts, either. I’ve met a few sexual athletes in my life, the kind who’ve read all the manuals and wear your orgasms on their chests like medals, and without denying the pleasure I had with them, with Alek it was different.

  The thing is that Alek really loves the body, he loves the body as if he’s never seen a movie in his life, or a TV commercial; he is free of the external eye and aesthetic perception. It’s difficult to explain properly, because Alek actually likes looking, but it seems as if the sights penetrate him and are beautiful in his eyes and gladden his heart not in the conventional way, not because of “what they look like.” Somehow, almost always when sexual moves are initiated, he seems to undergo a transformation; he fills then with a kind of wonder, and seems to be intent only on guessing and serving—not because it swells his ego, even though in some way of course it swells his ego, of course it does—but the main thing is that he is entranced. Entranced—perhaps this is the right word, as if we are the first people in the world to perform the act, sinking deeper and deeper into it, and the spell is so potent that my external eye too closes until I am all body and until the body vanishes.

  Sometimes I think that it is this transformation that drives me crazy. Sometimes I like to look at him in public. To look at his restrained public movements, and then to remember their opposite.

  On a number of occasions I have heard Alek describing an old woman as “beautiful,” or an official beauty as “not interesting,” and altogether it seemed that most of the conventional ways of judging women had passed him by. For example, he likes women’s perfumes, and knows how to distinguish between them, too, his favorite is “White Shoulders,” on my neck at least, but in our first month together, when we once emerged from the shower together, he took the deodorant out of my hand, put it back on the shelf, and said: “Not yet, with your permission, we haven’t finished yet,” and it wasn’t an empty gesture. Over the course of time I really became convinced that this clean man really loved the odors of my body, and in our day and age maybe this is enough to win a woman’s heart.

  I remember how on my fourth visit to him in Moscow, it was summer then, we were already in his apartment in Ordenka, and I had forgotten my razor blades at home. And since we’re talking about Moscow here, there was no way I could just walk into a shop and buy one. In the end I found a packet of razor blades in a bookshop, in a locked display case next to Ajax cleaning fluid, but before I did so, the stubble that had sprouted on my legs during the course of the week did not stop Alek from rubbing his face on them and smiling to himself as if he was innocently delighting in the new touch.

  Thanks to running or genetics, or perhaps to the fire of my madness, my body is what is referred to as “well preserved,” but it is very far from being the body of a seventeen-year-old girl. Before every trip to visit him there is a certain moment in front of the mirror when I take note of the changes, but Alek without words somehow manages to persuade me that they only make me more interesting, and to the signs of aging that appear on my skin from one visit to the next he relates the way a woman is supposed to relate to a man’s scars of honor.

  In recent years, ever since my first visit to Russia, I began to attribute this identification with the body to the landscapes of his motherland, perhaps because it was very pronounced over there. He always enjoyed feeding me, but in Moscow it seemed that the simplest act of eating gave him immense pleasure, as when he raised a forkful of food to my mouth and said: “Taste this, see how you like it,” and never took his eyes off me as I bit and chewed, and kissed me without being ashamed of the taste of food in his mouth.

  “In Israel the food is tasteless, in Paris they know how to cook the best, but food only has a real taste here.” Perhaps because I saw Moscow through his eyes, and through the rest of his senses, I too began to sense the “real taste of food.” Like the taste and the smell of the sex, which were sharper there than anything I had known before. I had never lived my body as I did there, and it had never dissolved and evaporated as it did there.

  All this is true, the truth as far as I am capable of formulating it, and still it revolts, it disgusts me, it utterly disgusts me to have to put the sex with him and my body with him into words. “The sights penetrate him,” “he undergoes a transformation,” “he is intent on guessing and serving.” Why do I do it? Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.

  BIRTH

  When he thought I had calmed down he said: “I’ll go down and call Yoash now to come with the pickup,” and I clung to him and said: “No, don’t go. I don’t want to. I don’t want to drive,” and then he stroked me a little more and raised my chin and gave me a look that brought a reluctant smile to my lips. “Five minutes,” he said, “five minutes and I’ll be back with you again.”

  By the time he returned I was already dressed and I had also cleaned myself up a bit. I still felt nauseated, but I was already able to think of the drive without wanting to throw up. On the way out to the pickup he draped his brown corduroy shirt over my shoulders, and, wrapped in his shirt with his arm around me all the way, I rode between the two men to the hospital to give birth to Hagar.

  The drive to Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem took maybe twenty minutes, and when he put me in the nurses’ hands my mood was already greatly improved, as if I had been infected by Alek’s festivity, and had risen to the importance of the occasion. And nevertheless he lingered a little longer, gazing at me in admiration, as if at the ultimate mystery, and then he kissed me gravely on the forehead, as if he were sending me on some important mission. “Ti molodetz,” he said to me before he left.

  Months later I asked him: “What’s molodetz?” “Say it again … ah, molodetz. Where did you hear that word?” he was suddenly curious.

  “Someone said it to me.”

  “Molodetz is … hero, person who overcomes. You say this of a man, but it may also be said of a woman. It could be said about you, that you are molodetz. The someone who said it to you, he said it about you?” I didn’t answer. It was a few weeks after Yom Kippur, the two of us had invaded Yoash’s apartment in Yarkon Street, and instead of answering I asked him if he had heard anything more about Yoash, who was still in the agricultural buffer zone on the other side of the Suez Canal.

  A birth is a birth, millions of women all over the world give birth every day in worse conditions than I did, and I really have no intention of turning my delivery into something heroic. After being handed over to the nurses the usual procedure began, what was then the “usual procedure.” I know from my girlfriends that a few things have changed since then. They gave me a nightgown, shaved me, gave me an enema, lay me on a bed in the labor room, stuck an IV into my arm, and attached me to a monitor to wait. On the other side of the screen was an empty bed, and beyond that empty bed a woman with a middle-aged voice was wailing fearsomely. At a certain point, when I had already lost my sense of time—they had taken away my watch—they wheeled her out, and after that there were other voices belonging to other women. From time to time a relation came in to visit one of them, and every few minutes the midwife came to see “how we’re coming along.” Two or three times she accompanied me, tottering and hanging on to the IV stand, to the toilet.

  In years to come, when my friends began comparing the tales of their deliveries, I understood that I had apparently made good progress, i.e. at a normal pace, for a first birth. What I especially remember is the fear of how much worse the pain could get that came with every wave of contractions, and the graph on the monitor representing the climb from contraction to contraction, like an abstract threat of torture. How much more could I take? The same pain, presumably, was experienced by all the women beyond the screen, and by every woma
n in the world who has ever given birth, and it is of no particular interest, at least in the context of the story that I am telling here.

  What is pertinent to the story is my perverse feeling that I was somehow handing myself over as a willing sacrifice for the sake of something of surpassing importance, which was not only the baby about to be born. Suffering pain and nausea and shivering with cold—for some reason I felt cold all the time—my mind filled with confused, hallucinatory images of ancient rituals, in my folly I saw the daughter of Jephthah and the daughter of Montezuma, and somehow it all connected to Alek and his kiss on my forehead, as if he had sent me to the sacrifice.

  Pain is pain is pain, what else can be said of it? But I hadn’t resolved to “bear it with honor” for nothing, my gritted teeth and clamped jaw were connected to the thought that Alek was somehow watching me, and this is what he expected to see. To see me “bearing it with honor.” As the hours passed I gradually lost all control over logic, until at a certain point it seemed to me that Alek himself had inflicted this agony on me, and since he had inflicted it I accepted it, breathing quietly, barely sighing, and hugging his corduroy shirt.

  Ten years ago, after my sister gave birth to her twins, a few of her girlfriends were visiting her at home, and, as was usual on these occasions, reminisced like war veterans about battles waged in the delivery room. One of them, orange-haired and ample-bosomed, was burping Noam on her shoulder, and at the same time making us all laugh with reports of how she had made her husband suffer during her labor, and how she had screamed at the top of her voice. “I had a ball, believe me, I really went to town, people must have heard me screaming miles away.”

  “Didn’t they give you an epidural?” “You bet they did. Right at the beginning I screamed so loudly that they didn’t have a choice, they came running to give it to me. What am I, a wounded soldier, to lie there and suffer in silence? How many opportunities do I have in my life to scream? So the minute I get the chance I do it with all my heart.”